2006 Martin Dale Fellow Mimi Chubb will spend the next year
traveling and writing about Western imagery.

Photo: John Jameson

Sophomores win Dale Summer Awards

Eight sophomores are winners of this year’s Dale
Summer Awards, which provide a $4,000 stipend to pursue a summer project not
connected to their academic coursework. The recipients and the titles of their
projects are:

Through images and words, Dale winner will explore Old West

Posted May 8, 2006; 09:34 a.m.

by Eric Quiñones

Although it was the mid-1990s when Mimi Chubb’s
family moved from Brooklyn to California’s Orange County, the pioneer spirit of
the Old West was still alive and well.

Chubb, now a Princeton senior, quickly grew fascinated with horses,
cowboy gear and other symbols of the “authentic” American West after moving
cross-country to Irvine, Calif., at age 11. She will engage these interests
through a year of traveling and writing about Western imagery as the 2006
winner of the Martin Dale Fellowship.

The $27,500 fellowship is awarded annually to a graduating senior
to allow him or her “to devote the year following graduation to an independent
project of extraordinary merit that will widen the recipient’s experience of
the world and significantly enhance his or her personal growth and intellectual
development.”

Chubb, an English major and certificate candidate in creative
writing, plans to write a collection of five essays on her observations of
Western culture. The project, titled “Fantasy, Authenticity and Identity:
Imagining the American West,” will allow Chubb to explore her own feelings of
connection to the West while observing and writing about people and subjects
that “haunt and fascinate” her.

“My cookie-cutter suburban neighborhood was as dissimilar as could
be to an Old West boomtown, but we nevertheless spent months on end in
elementary school studying the Gold Rush, as if it were holy lore,” Chubb wrote
in her Dale application. “Sometimes we even panned for fool’s gold in patches
of mud that had been carefully stocked by our teacher and a few parent
volunteers, who also handed us Dixie cups full of baked beans.

“I grew up riding horses — symbols of the West for me and for many
others — and my obsession with everything about them propelled me into various
communities of horse people, many of whom would wear cowboy hats and vanity
license plates on their pickups printed with phrases like ‘COWGRRL,’ regardless
of whether they had ever ridden in a Western saddle,” she wrote. “None of this
ever really made sense to me when I was growing up, although the people I knew
seemed to assume that it would.”

For her Dale project, Chubb will travel around California and
surrounding states with an aim “to focus on the ways in which these myths and
fantasies create identities and create ‘the real’ for some people.”

She first plans to study a group of Californians who adopt wild
mustangs from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, through which she will
explore the concept of “wildness” in the West. She then will look at ways in which
the Old West is marketed by following the Miss Rodeo America pageant through
California to its final round in Las Vegas, “which promises to be a riot of big
teased curls and flashy Western fashions.”

Chubb also hopes to engage members of the Mojave Muleskinners, an
Old West re-enactment group, and the American Mountain Men, an organization
dedicated to preserving “manly” Old West traditions. She also will examine the
continuing lure of ghost towns among visitors, preservationists and commercial
developers. Finally, she will delve into the world of cowboy poetry, “which has
become a powerful, insider-centered genre for imagining the West, its history
and its future that has a vibrant community of readers.”

The Dale project will allow Chubb to pursue longer, more literary
writing projects and hone her journalistic skills, building on the considerable
experience she has gained as a Princeton student.

“It’s going to be just wonderful,” Chubb said. “What’s so exciting
about the Dale Fellowship is the opportunity to focus on this one thing that I
want to do so much. It is very hard to fit [writing] in against a background of
a lot of other activities and classes.”

Chubb has won numerous awards for her writing and academic
accomplishments, including the Class of 1870 Junior Prize for the best junior
English scholar in 2005 and the Shapiro Prize for Academic Excellence in 2004.
For her senior thesis, she wrote a novel that centers on a “megachurch” whose
leaders and members are defined by their sense of Western identity and values.
The characters were based on people she observed while attending an Orange
County megachurch last summer, with funding from the English department’s A.
Scott Berg Award for summer research.

Chubb’s thesis adviser was the novelist Chang-rae Lee, a professor
in the Council of the Humanities and creative writing. Lee is one of several
acclaimed writers on the University faculty with whom Chubb has studied,
including Joyce Carol Oates, Edmund White and C.K. Williams.

Author and editor Wendy Lesser, a visiting professor at Princeton
last year, also has had a significant influence on Chubb — publishing two of
Chubb’s essays in her literary magazine, The Threepenny Review.

“Her work is subtle and complex without ever being obscure or
pretentious, and she has a mastery of tone that I have rarely seen in any
student — in fact, in anyone under about 35 or 40,” said Lesser, who taught
Chubb in a course on “Autobiography and Criticism.”

“She was a great writer when she came into my class and a great writer
when she left it; all I had to do was stand aside and let her go,” Lesser said.

Chubb also spent two years as a reporter for The Daily Princetonian
and worked as an editor for three campus literary publications. She twice
served as a summer intern for The New Yorker, reviewing fiction submissions
“and learning a lot about how they develop their pieces,” she said.

Chubb may pursue graduate studies after completing her Dale
project, but knows that writing is her ultimate career goal.

Lesser said, “She has the talent and she also has the drive — not
the obnoxious careerist-ambition kind of drive, but the down-to-earth
willingness to work very hard until she gets something right. I have already
mentioned her name to several editors in New York and told them to watch for
her work in the future.”